There have been notable advances in the scientific understanding of regeneration within the past year alone, including two recently published in BMC Biology. Increasingly, progress in the regeneration field is being inspired by comparisons with stem cell biology and enabled by newly developed techniques that allow simultaneous examination of thousands of genes and proteins. See research articles http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/7/83 and http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/8/5.